The portraits that follow are from a large number of photographs recently recovered from sealed archives in Moscow, some—rumor has it—from a cache in the bottom of an elevator shaft. Five of those that follow, Akhmatova, Chekhov (with dog), Nabokov, Pasternak (with book), and Tolstoy (on horseback) are from a volume entitled The Russian Century, published early last year by Random House. Seven photographs from that research, which were not incorporated in The Russian Century, are published here for the first time: Bulgakov, Bunin , Eisenstein (in a group with Pasternak and Mayakovski), Gorki, Mayakovski, Nabokov (with mother and sister), Tolstoy (with Chekhov), and Yesenin. The photographs of Andreyev, Babel, and Kharms were supplied by the writers who did the texts on them. The photograph of Dostoyevsky is from the Bettmann archives. Writers who were thought to have an especial affinity with particular Russian authors were asked to provide the accompanying texts. We are immensely in their debt for their cooperation.

Boris Pasternak

Pasternak’s poems are like the flash of a strobe light—for an instant they reveal a corner of the universe not visible to the naked eye. I fell in love with these poems as a child. They were magical , fragments of the natural world captured in words that I did not always understand. Pasternak was my father’s favorite poet. In the evenings he often recited his poems aloud, as did Marina Tsvetayeva, a friend of the family who often came to our house in those years before the war.

Long afterwards, George Plimpton and Harold Humes brought the live Pasternak into my life. A year or so after the resounding success of Doctor Zhivago, when the dust had begun to settle on the scandal of his being forced to give up the Nobel Prize, they sent me on a mission to Moscow to interview the poet for The Paris Review.

I’ll never forget that sunny day at Peredelkino in the winter of 1959-1960, a few months before Pasternak died. The sparkling snow, the fir trees, the half corn note pinned to the door on the veranda at the side of the house: “I am working now. I cannot receive anybody. Please go away.” On an impulse, thinking of the small gifts I was bringing the poet from admirers in the West, I did knock. The door opened.

Pasternak stood there, wearing an astrakhan hat. When I introduced myself he welcomed me cordially as my father’s daughter—they had met in Berlin in the twenties. Pasternak’s intonations were those of his poems. In an instant the warm, slightly nasal singsong voice assured me that my parents’ country still existed and that it had a future as real as that sunny day. Today, no matter how harsh life in Russia is, that flash of feeling is proven true. Russia has survived, and the natural world around us which Pasternak celebrated is as wondrous as ever.

—Olga Carlisle

Leonid Andreyev

When I interviewed Milan Kundera in the eighties in Paris, he said: “Andreyev, an old friend, a friend of my childhood. A huge writer.” And Pasternak in 1960 in Peredelkino: “The 1900s in Russia loom in the mind like great mountains seen in the distance, enormous. Andreyev’s talent was enormous and it seems to grow with time.”

Yet at that time Leonid Andreyev was all but suppressed in the Soviet Union. On my visits there, if I identified myself as his granddaughter I was greeted with awe—a proscribed writer who had loved his country with the dangerous, passionate intensity that he brought to political writing, to literature, to the theater, to photography, to life.

Long before my visits to Moscow, during the Great War, when Leonid Andreyev was still one of Russia’s most famous writers, he had foreseen Lenin’s demonic plans for the future. He denounced the oncoming Bolshevik takeover, calling for an Allied intervention. Then, in 1919 Andreyev died in Finland in complete isolation and disappeared from Soviet literary consciousness for fifty years.

Now in the nineties he is being rediscovered in Russia, his stories published, his plays produced—two are hits in Moscow this season. Ekaterina was a sensation in London last year, the story of a young woman betrayed by the men in her life, much as Russia was betrayed by her leaders in World War I. The Governor, a novella about the assassination of a Tsarist high official by righteous revolutionaries, echoes the present-day life in Moscow, where political power and fear of terrorist reprisals are inseparable.

In this self-portrait, Leonid Andreyev, the grandson of a serf, with his extraordinary looks, his multiple talents, seems once again to be brooding about the future of man and seeing an abyss.

                —Olga Carlisle

Vladimir Mayakovski

“I am not Mayakovski’s daughter!” I shouted to the three gents from the Union of Soviet Writers seated in the berth opposite mine. It was 2 A.M. on a June night in 1979, on a nicotine-reeking train bound for Tbilisi, Georgia. I was part of a delegation of American writers sent to the Soviet Union for one of their literary palavers, and my Soviet colleagues had come into my compartment in the middle of the night to convince me that I was Mayakovski’s daughter. Now this allegation was not entirely without substance. My mother, Tatiana Iacovleva, who had fled to Paris from the Soviet Union in 1926, was one of the two great loves of Mayakovski’s life; he had committed suicide a few months after she married my French father, and some of his finest late poems had been dedicated to her. Moreover, in the early 1970s the prominent Soviet magazine Ogoňok had published a story, accompanied by an ancient photograph of me as a bikini clad fourteen-year-old, declaring that Mayakovski’s daughter was alive and well in the United States.

Even then I had reeled at the possibility of a paternity other than the one I knew. My father was a valiant diplomat and one of the first martyrs of the Free French movement. What did I have to do with the flamboyant Soviet propagandist Mayakovski, an uncouth egotist and somewhat overestimated poet who drove a long silver Bugati during his trips to Paris in the 1920s? Besides, the chronological facts made this paternity more than improbable: Mayakovski’s very last stay in Paris had ended in April of 1929, and I was born on September 30, 1930.

“These are the facts!” I proclaimed to my Soviet colleagues in the pre-dawn of Georgia, brandishing my passport and pointing to my birth date. “What are you thinking of, an elephantine gestation?“

“Someone made a mistake on your passport,” one of my Soviet colleagues maintained. “Irunda, nonsense!” I argued back. “In the U.S.A. we don’t fake passports!”

By three or four A.M. the tovarishchi had slouched back to their own compartment, looking defeated. Trying to catch a wink, I thought of a few men beyond my own heroic, undeniable father—whose daughter I wouldn’t have minded being: André Malraux; Jean Gabin; the great poet René Char, another valiant Resistance fighter. But Mayakovski? A thousand times nyet. I felt only pity for the passionate manner in which this gifted, exploited poet had extolled the Soviet dream, and for the bitter disillusionment that was the true cause of his death.

—Francine du Plessix Gray